Every few months, a case involving a minor - abuse, trafficking, or exploitation, surfaces in Nagaland’s news cycle, is discussed with urgency for a few days, and is then allowed to fade. What is rarely examined with the same urgency is how such cases are reported in the first place, and what damage may be done in the process of “breaking the news.”
Child safety in Nagaland cannot be treated as a matter for law enforcement and child welfare committees alone. The media, as the primary channel through which such cases reach the public, carries a responsibility that is too often set aside in the rush for visibility and readership.
It has been observed repeatedly that identifying details of child survivors - names, photographs, school affiliations, or the localities where they reside, are disclosed by local outlets and social media pages, sometimes inadvertently and sometimes for the sake of a more “complete” story. Under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, such disclosure is not a minor lapse; it is a legal violation with lasting consequences for the child involved. Yet awareness of these provisions among reporters, editors, and even citizen journalists across the state remains inconsistent at best.
This gap points to an urgent need for sensitization. Workshops, certification modules and collaboration with the Nagaland State Commission for Protection of Child Rights could be built into the training of working journalists and journalism students alike. Media houses could be encouraged to adopt internal editorial guidelines and child protection policy specific to reporting on minors, rather than relying on individual discretion in the heat of a deadline.
Ethical and responsible reporting is not a constraint on press freedom; it is what gives that freedom its credibility. A story pursued at the cost of a child's dignity is not a public service - it is a form of secondary harm, inflicted this time not by the original offender but by the very institution meant to hold society accountable. Restraint, in such cases, should be understood not as censorship but as a professional and moral obligation.
Beyond legal compliance, a more human approach to such reporting is called for. Numbers, case details, and sensational headlines cannot be allowed to overshadow the reality that a child's life, safety and future are at stake. The instinct to be first with a story should be weighed, always, against the instinct to do no further harm.
Nagaland's media landscape, still comparatively young and closely knit, is well placed to set a different standard - one where the welfare of the child is treated as non-negotiable, and where breaking news is never allowed to break a child a second time. Civil society, legal bodies and media associations are called upon to work together toward this end, so that reporting on children in vulnerable circumstances becomes an act of protection rather than exposure.
